Where We Come From

Mixpak;
2014

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Music from this release

The best dancehall album of the year so far is also, interestingly, one of the best pop albums of the year. Popcaan, aka Andre Jay Sutherland, is the current leader in the neverending battle for supremacy among Jamaican deejays, but unlike previous kings of the hill (most recently, Mavado and Vybz Kartel, the latter who also has functioned as Sutherland’s mentor) he’s not overly concerned with projecting the image of a badman. He’s a lover, not a gangster, and it’s an impressively broad kind of love that he’s putting out. Where We Come From is a party, and everyone’s invited.

The album was executive produced by Brooklyn beatmaker and Mixpak label owner Dre Skull, aka Andrew Hershey, who’s become an unlikely heavyweight in the Jamaican music scene thanks to jubilant compositions like the Kling Klang and Loudspeaker riddims. He also worked on Snoop Dogg’s reggae rebrand as Snoop Lion alongside Diplo and Ariel Rechtshaid, and Where We Come From feels like another attempt at doing what last year's Reincarnated failed to do: connect dancehall with an American pop audience that hasn’t seen an actual dancehall artist on the pop charts in years.

Sutherland and Hershey make a great team. Sutherland has a super-melodic flow (he’s what is sometimes referred to as a “singjay”) and nimble sense of melody, so Hershey's beats offer a lot of opportunities to exploit both talents, even as they stick to chord progressions that don't stray from dancehall's conventions. Hershey's production skills also make a good platform for Sutherland's expressive delivery, converting the plaintive strings and funereal tolling bells of “Hold On” into triumphant uplift and the stroboscopic rave synths of “Ghetto (Tired of Crying)” into a meditation on violence tinged with hint of hopefulness.

Overall, Where We Come From isn’t animated by solemnity, or even the salaciousness that infuses “Number One Freak” and “Love Yuh Bad”, but an ecstatic joy that transcends genre. Sutherland is a massively charismatic character, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the elation that he so obviously feels when he gets from finding the perfect groove. That feeling permeates every corner of the album, but it comes through strongest on two particular tracks. The thematic concerns of “Everything Nice” are right there in the title, and it’s easy to feel the same way while the song is playing, thanks to a buoyant, bliss-inducing beat by Mixpak-affiliated producer Dubbel Dutch (who’s responsible for five of the 13 tracks).

“Waiting So Long,” on the other hand, bursts with kinetic energy. The beat, by Swedish producer Adde Instrumentals (who also produced Sutherland’s 2011 Jamaican hit “Ravin”), is a techno-bubblegummy pileup of whining synths, string stabs, and handclaps that, boosted by Sutherland’s recursively loopy vocal melody, constantly reaches higher and higher towards giddy new levels of euphoria, exploding kaleidoscopically like the all-out finale of a fireworks explosion that lasts three straight minutes. It’s the type of song that can push everything else completely out of your field of attention for its entire duration, one of those pop moments that fully deserves to be called “transcendental.” In a perfect world, it would be a smash; as far as the one we live in now, it’s noticeably better for having this song and Where We Come From in it.